Joe looked curiously at this latest band of marauders.  They were young men of from seventeen and eighteen to twenty-three and -four years of age, and bore the unmistakable stamp of the hoodlum class.  There were vicious faces among them—­faces so vicious as to make Joe’s flesh creep as he looked at them.  A couple grasped him tightly by the arms, and Fred and Charley were similarly held captive.

“Look here, you,” said one who spoke with the authority of leader, “we ’ve got to inquire into this.  Wot ‘s be’n goin’ on here?  Wot ’re you up to, Red-head?  Wot you be’n doin’?”

“Ain’t be’n doin’ nothin’,” Simpson whined.

“Looks like it.”  The leader turned up Brick’s face to the electric light.  “Who ‘s been paintin’ you up like that?” he demanded.

Brick pointed at Joe, who was forthwith dragged to the front.

“Wot was you scrappin’ about?”

“Kites—­my kites,” Joe spoke up boldly.  “That fellow tried to take them away from me.  He ’s got them under his arm now.”

“Oh, he has, has he?  Look here, you Brick, we don’t put up with stealin’ in this territory.  See?  You never rightly owned nothin’.  Come, fork over the kites.  Last call.”

The leader tightened his grasp threateningly, and Simpson, weeping tears of rage, surrendered the plunder.

“Wot yer got under yer arm?” the leader demanded abruptly of Fred, at the same time jerking out the bundle.  “More kites, eh?  Reg’lar kite-factory gone and got itself lost,” he remarked finally, when he had appropriated Charley’s bundle.  “Now, wot I wants to know is wot we ‘re goin’ to do to you t’ree chaps?” he continued in a judicial tone.

“What for?” Joe demanded hotly.  “For being robbed of our kites?”

“Not at all, not at all,” the leader responded politely; “but for luggin’ kites round these quarters an’ causin’ all this unseemly disturbance.  It ’s disgraceful; that ’s wot it is—­disgraceful.”

At this juncture, when the Hill-dwellers were the center of attraction, Brick suddenly wormed out of his jacket, squirmed away from his captors, and dashed across the lot to the slip for which he had been originally headed when overtaken by Joe.  Two or three of the gang shot over the fence after him in noisy pursuit.  There was much barking and howling of back-yard dogs and clattering of shoes over sheds and boxes.  Then there came a splashing of water, as though a barrel of it had been precipitated to the ground.  Several minutes later the pursuers returned, very sheepish and very wet from the deluge presented them by the wily Brick, whose voice, high up in the air from some friendly housetop, could be heard defiantly jeering them.

This event apparently disconcerted the leader of the gang, and just as he turned to Joe and Fred and Charley, a long and peculiar whistle came to their ears from the street—­the warning signal, evidently, of a scout posted to keep a lookout.  The next moment the scout himself came flying back to the main body, which was already beginning to retreat.